D&D Beyond Releases Free Forgotten Realms Adventure

D&D Beyond has a new Forgotten Realms-focused adventure that focuses on battling the forces of Orcus. Today, D&D Beyond released The Tenebrous Stone, a new adventure that will appear in the upcoming Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun book. The adventure is a Level 3 "Deity Adventure" set in Helmsdale and sends players into a basalt quarry to track down an evil artifact. Players will battle several undead creatures before a final encounter at the hidden location of the artifact.

The adventure is one of many in the book and is similarly structured as the quick adventures found in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. There's a map, three encounters, and a brief overview of the adventure, but otherwise The Tenebrous Stone is relatively light. D&D Beyond has also loaded up the adventure on its Maps VTT, complete with both maps and monsters pre-loaded for the DM.

Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun will be released on November 11th.

 

[Zaukrie]

Just ran this, and it went really fun/well against 3 PCs.....

 

[gobrooksgo]

Huh. So we need a diety adventure now? Are our characters suddenly overweight? What happened to body positivity!

(I appreciated that. Even if none of these other nerds did. )

 

[mamba]

This is a Setting book, after all, not a pre-written campaign.

I was not arguing for full adventures, I was arguing against these lacking side quests. Spend those 50 pages on the setting, not some bare-bones, lackluster side quest skeletons

Remove them altogether, include the half page map and a sentence to paragraph about the scenario if you want to. That one sentence / paragraph is about as useful as the half page text. That gives you 25 pages more for the setting without losing anything of value

 

[Parmandur]

I was not arguing for full adventures, I was arguing against these lacking side quests. Spend those 50 pages on the setting, not some bare-bones, lackluster side quest skeletons

Remove them altogether, include the half page map and a sentence to paragraph about the scenario if you want to. That one sentence / paragraph is about as useful as the half page text. That gives you 25 pages more for the setting without losing anything of value

But then they would require more prep work, these are puck up and go.

 

[mamba]

But then they would require more prep work, these are puck up and go.

eh, I see very little difference in the prep work required, they only did the easy part and left most of it to me either way

I can run an encounter or two using what they provided with no prep, sure, but that does not an adventure make. Not even a side quest really

 

[Parmandur]

eh, I see very little difference in the prep work required, they only did the easy part and left most of it to me either way

I can run an encounter or two using what they provided with no prep, sure, but that does not an adventure make. Not even a side quest really

The DMG mini-Advebtures are easy to run with no prep at all. The Encoutner math and maps are arguably the hard part, the other hooks arr easier to improvise.

 

[Reef]

The DMG mini-Advebtures are easy to run with no prep at all. The Encoutner math and maps are arguably the hard part, the other hooks arr easier to improvise.

That's exactly my take on it. If I'm looking for a mini-adventure, I'm not looking for detailed npc's and plotlines. Chances are, I have those already as part of my campaign. I'm looking for a filler episode I can slot in, or am simply looking for an encounter area to stage the quest I was already planning. Having too much actual detail already set up makes plug and play more difficult.

Now, if I'm looking for a multiple session adventure to drop in, then yes, at that point I want the designers to do the hard lifting in regards to story, npc motives, and characterizations. But that's not what these are for.

 

[mamba]

The DMG mini-Advebtures are easy to run with no prep at all. The Encoutner math and maps are arguably the hard part, the other hooks arr easier to improvise.

I was fine with maps and a intro paragraph, so we can take these out of the equation. I agree that they are the only value these one-pagers provide.

The encounter math is not that hard, what is more it locks the encounter / quest to a level. Leaving that open and instead providing me more details about the location is a plus in my book. Give me interesting things about it, not the equivalent to two random encounters in an empty room.

As it stands, I take the map plus paragraph over the full page. The added text just restricts my options with nothing to show for it. If I have to come up with stuff to make things interesting, then the text should have the decency of helping with it instead of getting in the way